Born in 1937 in Harlem, New York, Claude Brown spent his childhood "roaming the streets with junkies, whores, pimps, hustlers, the 'mean cats' and the numbers runners" (Brown in Stine and Marowski, p. 33). Brown served several sentences in various reformatories until 1953, when after having seen too many of his friends die in drug-related crimes, he left Harlem for Greenwich Village, where he earned a living as a busboy and a watch repairman. Brown eventually enrolled in night school to earn his high school diploma, then in Howard University, where he began writing Manchild in the Promised Land.
Mid-twentieth-century Harlem. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, waves of black migrants from the South inundated cities in the North such as Chicago and New York. They came in search of a promised land free of racism and rich with opportunity. In the city of New York, Harlem became a mecca for black newcomers to the region. In Harlem-especially during the 1920s-they found a community in which their own art and music could thrive and one from which they would not be excluded by laws or customs.
This page contains 201 words.
Manchild in the Promised Land article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,835 words
(approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Manchild in the Promised Land Article
